Professor Ferriss's teaching, whether of literature or of creative writing, stems from her experience as a writer, a vocation that is itself a continuous experience of learning from and for literature. Put simply, her goal is to ask and prompt the question: “What is happening here?” Literature and creative writing are not ciphers by which we figure out a message, an adage, or a bit of history; they are dynamic events shaped by writers and readers in a shared imaginative world.